This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

Shel Silverstein : “Talked my head off Worked my tail off Cried my eyes out Walked my feet off Sang my heart out So you see, There’s really not much left of me.” ~

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Friday, May 16, 2014

किती पुतळे आहेत गोळवलकर गुरुजींचे?...Pygmalion Falls In Love

Narendra Modi, 63, a card-carrying member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for which he started volunteering at the age of eight, is all set to become India's Prime Minister

Rick Perlstein, preface to 'The Invisible Bridge: The Fall
of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan', 2014:

"...But a central theme of my previous two books
chronicling conservatism’s ascendency in American politics has been the myopia
of pundits, who so frequently fail to notice the very cultural ground shifting
beneath their feet..."

Luis Buñuel, 'My Last Sigh':

"I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that
his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that
humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be
able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false
but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live
forgetfulness, I've always said—the only dignity I see is in oblivion.”

Financial Times, May 13 2014:

"The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS believe that India is the Hindu
holy land and that it needs protection from outside cultural influences
including the country's Muslim and Christian minorities. The
organisation has mobilised behind Narendra Modi in the current election
in the hope that he will further their aims for the nation."

Marc Bloch, 'The Historian’s Craft', 1953:

"Are
we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our
forefathers into the just and the damned …? When the passions of the
past blend with the prejudices of the present, human reality is reduced
to a picture in black and white."

Dr. Ramachandra Guha, 'Makers of Modern India', 2011:"...There were important Hindu right-wing thinkers before (M S) Golwalkar, such as V.D. Savarkar and Madan Mohan Malaviya. These may have been more subtle or sophisticated, but scarcely as effective or influential. Through his three decades as the head of the RSS, Golwalkar exercised a deep influence on the society and politics of modem India. A lifelong brahmadtari, or celibate, he acquired, in the fashion of a typical Hindu guru, a cult of younger male acolytes. These went on to become chief ministers of large Indian states. Others acquired even more power, directing the affairs of the Central government in New Delhi. Thus, Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India between 1998 and 2004, and Lai Krishna Advani, home minister and deputy prime minister during the same period, were both, in a personal as well as ideological sense, disciples of the long-time head of the RSS..."

Simon Critchley, review of John Gray's 'The Silence of Animals', 2013:"...Today’s
metaphysics is called “liberal humanism,” with a quasi-religious faith in
progress, the power of reason and the perfectibility of humankind. The
quintessential contemporary liberal humanists are those Obamaists, with their
grotesque endless conversations about engagement in the world and their
conviction that history has two sides, right and wrong, and they are naturally
on the right side of it..."

John Buchan, Greenmantle, 1916:

"Some day, when the full history is written – sober history with ample documents – the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage."

I am often amused by the shallowness of what I read in most Indian newspapers or see on most Indian TV news channels. I often recall whatNicholas Taleb says: “To be competent, a journalist
should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of information he
is providing…Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a
historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the
journalist.”

I have largely stopped writing about it. But here I make an exception with an example from a Marathi newspaper.

"....Lokmanya Tilak died in 1920 and Shahu Chhatrapati in 1922. But after that their followers did not get a single leader who could replace them. This resulted into Maharashtra who once was a leader in politics fell so far behind that it has not been able to get back to its earlier position..."]

[...Around 1925 the followers of (B G) Tilak installed (Vishnushastri) Chiplunkar's statue and got it inaugurated by none other other than (M K) Gandhi. The demand of Satyashodhak's like Jedhe and others to install (Mahatma) Phule's statue was dismissed.
Today before it completes the hundred years, it probably remains the only statue of Chiplunkar. However, one may find lots of Phule's statues...]

I have now read this argument- 'Maharashtra lost political leadership of India after 1922'- for many years.

The argument is cliched and all it does is strengthening of parochial tendencies in urban middle-class Maharashtra and their political leaders. (Perhaps it also is the objective of a large part of the Marathi media.)

The argument is simply not true. Here is an attempt to explain why.

According to Amazon.com: "Makers of Modern India collects the work of nineteen of India's
foremost generators of political sentiment, from those whose names
command instant global recognition to pioneering subaltern and feminist
thinkers whose works have until now remained obscure and inaccessible..."

Of the six people above, who do you think India's soon-to-be Prime Minister is closest to in his ideology? Dr. Guha's verdict, quoted above, leaves nothing to the doubt:

"...Golwalkar exercised a deep influence on the society and politics of modem India...Thus,
Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India between 1998 and 2004, and
Lai Krishna Advani, home minister and deputy prime minister during the
same period, were both, in a personal as well as ideological sense,
disciples of the long-time head of the RSS..."

I have no doubt Mr. Modi toois,in a personal as well as ideological sense, a disciple of Golwalkar guruji, just like Vajpayee and Advani (read Mr. Modi on M S Golwalkar in Caravan Magazine dated May 31 2014 here).

Golwalkar was born in Maharashtra and died there as late as in 1973.

How can then one say that 'Maharashtra fell far behind in politics' (महाराष्ट्र राजकारणात
एकदम मागे फेकला गेला) after the deaths of Tilak in 1920 and Shahu Chhatrapati in 1922?

Read what Dr. R. Guha further says about Mr. Golwalkar: "...Golwalkar saw three principal threats to the formation of a Hindu nation-—Muslims, Christians and communists. All three were foreignin origin, and the last were godless to boot. Golwalkar saw Muslims, Christians and communists as akin to the demons, or rakshashas, of Indian mythology, with the Hindus as the avenging angels who would slay them and thus restore the goodness and purity of the Motherland. The RSS itself was projected by Golwalkar as the chosen vehicle for this national and civilizational renewal of the Hindus..."? (page 371)

Is Dr. More ashamed to acknowledge Maharashtra's political leadership in
21st century India just because it is NOT in the hands of "liberal
humanists"?

I also feel this "fell far behind" argument does not do justice to the posthumous rise of Dr. B R Ambedkar as a political figure as 'tall' as Mahatma Gandhi. Arguably Ambedkar is now more important than Gandhi in India's electoral politics.

Let me now turn to the second quotation, above, of Dr. More. There, he sort of implies that Mahatma Phule has 'trumped' Chiplunkar because he has more statues!

The comparison is not fair although it is funny.

Chiplunkar lived for only thirty-one years to Phule's sixty-three. Chiplunkar's thoughts influenced B G Tilak, who in turn influenced M S Golwalkar. (Dr. Guha: "...Golwalkar also admired Bal Gangadhar Tilak, 'THE MILITANT NATIONALIST', for making culture so central to national identity and self-assertion...". He could have as well said Chiplunkar instead of Tilak.)

Therefore, the fair comparison is that of Phule with Tilak or Golwalkar- all three from Guha's list. If Dr. More makes that comparison, I doubt if he will give the decisive 'victory' to Phule.

By the way, I wonder how many statues of Golwalkar exist in India. I could NOT locate a single image of his statue on Google image search while Phule has got dozens of them.

But does it prove anything one way or the other?

If Phule were to appear today and examine India's democracy closely, he may think it is (perhaps) better than the rule of Peshwa of the first two decades of 19th century but would he be happier with it than the rule of the British Raj? Has the grip of Brahmanism on the Indian society at large loosened since his death? Would he chuckle after reading the leader from EPW, May 24 2014: "...If there is a message from Elections 2014 it is that India has been
changing. It is becoming a society where those with a voice are becoming
less tolerant, less compassionate and more aggressive towards those
without a voice. This is just the atmosphere for an aggressive mix of
religion and nationalism to find expression..."?

More than the Indian National Congress, 'liberal humanists' of India belonging to the writing/ talking community have been defeated in India's 2014 federal elections. They, of course, will continue to think that they are on the right side of history andwill cling on to their own Galatea.

"...Whatever we have achieved today, is because of sacrifices made by past
five generations. Jan Sangh was not known to the people, some thought it
is a social, cultural organisation. Today, I salute all those
generations who made sacrifices for nationalist causes. We should not
forget that we are here today because of sacrifices made by the past
generations..."

Pages

Henry Miller: "A picture… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book, a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One picture speaks to you, another doesn’t… Some pictures invite you to enter, then make you a prisoner. Some pictures you race through, as if on roller skates. Some lead you out by the back door. Some weigh you down, oppress you for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, make you weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair."...Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"